In this episode I share with you the simplest strategies to move away from distractions and actually complete what is necessary.Distractions are everywhere and unless we have a plan to navigate them, we will constantly fall victim to them.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Learn Share Grow live with Hayden Wilson. This is Episode 18 and today we’re talking all about removing distractions and how to create focus around what actually needs to be done I’m going to give you a few different strategies that you can implement, not only right away but I’m also going to give you the why behind it.

Thank you for joining me, as we go straight in, I’m going to show you graphics. What we’ve got here is the general office environment for most people. So you’ve got the little man or woman down here and their phone’s going off, emails are going off and they’ve got all of their social networks cranking up. There’s a line of people, music, noises in the background – everyone’s trying to steal a chunk to take a piece and utilise it for their own, I say selfish needs, but of course everyone has their own agenda. We live in a world with endless distractions and that creates a lack of focus which obviously in turn, creates a lack of results. I’m here today to teach you how to get those results by focusing your attention around things that we really need to do and that’s what we’ve been talking about all week, and today there are a ton more of strategies that I want to share with you.

To get a more realistic view on time I want you to start to have an awareness that time is a currency and the thing is, it’s a non renewable currency so you can’t go out there and earn more. One of the ways that I started to realise this is that are 24 hours in the day obviously, which equals 1,440 minutes which equals 86,400 seconds so by the time I said that and the time I said this, we’ve already used 5 seconds of time. Once you start to have an appreciation for quickly it starts to pass by and it doesn’t just roll over, so we can’t just take those 24 hours and tack them wherever we want or those 86,400 seconds into other areas of our life – once it’s gone, it’s gone – so we need to create that awareness of the non renewable resource of time.

The second thing that we need to realise in our why, why we’re being distracted is to discover the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost is what we’re giving up in relation to what we’ve chosen to do. It’s more of an economic term generally but it’s completely relevant to saying yes or no to different situations. So I want you to start identifying what you’re saying yes to, what you’re saying no to, and realise that these are all just blocks of time, everything should be seen and valued in blocks of time.

The last thing that we can do here, before I get onto the strategies of course, is to look at which areas of your life are pulling you away and actually distracting you. Once we can identify the different areas and elements in our life that are pulling us in what feels like these different directions and our priorities are all mixed up, little things, or big things in certain situations such as the environment – what sort of environment are you in, is it distracting, is there too much noise, is there not enough noise, a lot of people can actually work quite well to some white noise and I know there are some websites and digital radio stations out there that provide white noise in the background.

It might be interruptions – are you strong enough to have an interruption free zone, maybe you should put your headphones in when you’re working, maybe you work in an office environment where that’s okay; or another environment which signals to other people that you’re in the zone, you’re working hard and not looking to be distracted – even if you don’t have music on, it can be a cue that you’re busy and that you don’t have time to be distracted by other things – so give people that subtle message if you’re a little bit non confrontational and you don’t want to offend someone – we’ll get into that. Connection to the internet, your email might be going off, you might be checking your phone constantly – all of these are different contributing factors that allow our minds to be distracted away from what we should actually be doing and I know more than anyone how hard it can be to pull yourself out of a YouTube spiral or checking your phone which takes 2 seconds, but then you scroll down, put your thumb down and see the next lot of stories and if you find yourself doing that every ten minutes. Then two, three, four or five minutes go past and all of a sudden you’re typing a message to someone and you’ve totally forgotten about what you actually want to do. So be very careful on how you’re using the internet.

The last one is that you might be wasting time based on your “own needs”. I say that in quote marks because often we don’t know what our true needs are. I’ve covered a lot of that stuff in LSG Week 1 where I was talking all about habits – is it that we’re hungry, is it that we’re bored, there are always different factors that are trying to pull us away from what we actually need to do. So I want you to start to realise, what is it, what is my main goal. Once we can work out that main goal then we can start to set the priorities for weekly, hourly, daily tasks and understand what we actually need to get done. I have 15 hours of time allotted this week that I want to use for reading – where am I going to put them and what am I going to give up in order to get that. This whole week is about awareness on where your time is actually going so you can realise that in 168 hours in a week we do have time for sleep, time for reading, time to watch Hayden’s videos, time to spend time with our kids, time to watch movies, there’s a bunch of different stuff that we have time for, it’s just making sure that when we are working, we are actually at work.

This is what the best performers in the world do – they’re ruthless with their time. I’ve spent a lot of time with some very successful people and they are ruthless, they don’t give away their time easily - that’s not to say that they’re not generous when they are with you – when they’ve planned to see you they’re 100% with you, and that’s what I want you to do with your life. When you’re in, you’re all in. Rather than sitting there on your phone when you’re trying to have a conversation with your missus and you’re not really present, make sure that you allow that time and give that person 100% of your attention when you are with them, and when you’re not, then you can really focus 100% on the task that you’re doing and that will make you a lot more effective.

So now I want to share with you a couple of pretty confronting tasks. The first one is what I call the life expectancy wakeup call. There is a website called timeanddate.com and if you go in there, there’s a section where you can choose to have a countdown timer. This is a huge, huge wakeup call because the average life expectancy for someone born between 1960 and 2000, the average - females will live a little bit longer, but males and females - is about 77 or 78 years. So I want you to go into that website and put in your birthday when you turn 78. What this website does is give you a countdown timer of exactly how long, in seconds, you’ve got to live. Trust me, when you see this, when you see the numbers counting down it really gives you a new appreciation of how much time we have left on this planet, as an average. It’s a big wakeup call and something that you can really benefit from immediately.

The second thing that I want you to adhere to is what I call, the five day ‘no’ challenge. There are a lot of people out there right now saying that you need to say no and whatnot. I’ve tried to present a couple arguments for why you do need to start learning to say no and I’m going to give you five days to really look into yourself, pleasing yourself first, and every time someone asks you to do something I want you to ask yourself ‘is this going to help me reach my goal?’ Because we’ve already set our goal, we know what needs to be done, so is this going to move me forward towards my goal? When someone asks me to go to the movies, or someone asks me to do something that I may not necessarily want to do – can you help me do this, can you help me move (of course there are different situations when you do have to help) but then there are situations where your time isn’t best utilised in that area and you need to learn how to say no to certain situations. So I want to you give you the five day no challenge where every time you’re asked a request you need to discipline yourself and think is this going to move me towards my ultimate goal.

The third bunch of strategies I’m going to show you is three killer strategies that I’ve used and you can implement immediately - you can implement them as soon as we get off this video to create more focus around what you actually want to do and start to utilise that time better. The first one is to use aeroplane mode on your phone. Quite often I’ll whip out my phone in the morning and decide I want to do an hour of solid work, I flip my iphone up and press the aeroplane mode button and immediately, no calls can come in, no emails can come in, and the reality is I’ve got voicemail so if someone needs to reach me, an hour isn’t really going to affect too much time. You can play tricks on yourself and say, oh what if someone died or what if there’s an emergency situation, but in reality, we need to set that time away for ourselves and get a good voicemail system and allow ourselves to switch off and tune out, and get a grip on what actually needs to be done, so utilise aeroplane mode.

The second thing that you can do, is to use a timer. I don’t have my timer with me this very second, but it’s just a cheap e-bay $3 timer and I will set it to 30 minutes, 60 minutes, however long I think the task should take and then I will turn off all my distractions, I don’t have my phone notifications on, I don’t have my email notifications on – while I have that 60 minutes going, I work. I’ve found that using the time pressures and there’s also a website e.ggtimer.com, they’ll do a similar thing. I’ve found that when I have the timer I’m a lot more receptive and a lot more aware of how much time actually left to do that task, so jump onto e-bay and definitely pick up a very cheap timer – it’s one of the best investments you’ll make and it will allow you to create that focus much more in your life.

The third thing I want you to do, and I touched on this in my last point, is to turn off the distractions. You don’t need to have the facebook notifications going off – the ding. Remember last week we talked about dopamine dropping, when we talked about willpower, how every time we get a notification our dopamine levels rise and we get excited about what could be there, the potential news. You don’t need that on. If you’re trying to create focus and actually get results, we don’t need that dopamine hit. Stop using it as a false sense of excitement – turn them off, turn your phone notifications off. I turn off all my email notifications unless I choose to receive them on my phone, I don’t have them coming through because it’s a distraction. Turn off the alerts in facebook, Instagram, twitter, all those things, just switch them off, even if it’s just for the hour, two hours, three hours that you actually want to get things done.

I guarantee you that by implementing just those three strategies you’ll be a lot more effective in your life, you’ll start to get a lot more done and start to become a super producer as I call it.

So if there are any questions make sure you chuck them on the right hand side. Otherwise I’ll have all this information and a transcription available on haydenwilson.com.au and we also have a podcast on itunes so I would really appreciate any downloads or sharing of this information. If you like any of the content I put out and you think it’s useful and you know someone who could benefit from it please feel free to share it with them and tag them in it. If there are no questions I’m going to jump off now and I’ll see you again next time - tomorrow when we are going to talk more about time management. I’ll have a bunch more of strategies to share with you. Troy says he’s got 17,435 days to live – awesome Troy, I’m glad you did that exercise because it’s a real wakeup call. Anyone else who wants to do that, head on over to timeanddate.com and count down the rest of the days of your life, it’s a real wakeup call. Until next time, Ciao.